This week in gEEk: Who’s in bed with who in memory; batteries heat up, in a good way; Moto’s mobile device savior

Welcome to This week in gEEk, EDN’s short review of the week’s happenings.

There was more drama from the manufacturing world this week. IBM confirmed the end of its 20% premium pay  for some manufacturing workers at its Essex Junction, Vt, and East Fishkill manufacturing facilities, and this just after confirming a 180 employee lay off from the Vermont location in June. Honeywell also announced it will slash half of its workforce at imaging and mobility manufacturing facility in Skaneateles Falls, NY.

On a more positive manufacturing note, Elpida and Chinese inventor partners plans to spend $5 billion to build a 300-mm DRAM wafer fab in Suzhou Industrial Park, China. Elpida said its 50-nm DRAM process technology will be used initially, which will be migrated to 40-nm as soon as the process is ready. Long term, the total capital expenditure for the new fab up to 80,000 wafers per month capacity, could reach approximately $5 billion with opportunities for capacity expansions to also be considered. 

But one has to wonder what the extra DRAM will do to the memory’s pricing. Already forced down by cutthroat competition, iSuppli this week warned that the average DRAM contract price is expected to decline by more than 10% from the current level by the end of Q3. Analysts there report the inventory level in the channel and among PC OEMs has increased compared to Q2 and that global economic conditions are adding more uncertainty on the demand side of the equation.

While we’re on memory, let’s talk NAND competition. Hynix and Numonyx are set to broaden the scope of their joint development efforts to NAND as the two companies combine resources. Numonyx, we remind you, is an Intel-STMicroelectronics flash company, and, interestingly, Intel has a separate NAND flash joint venture with Micron, IM Flash Technologies. While an Intel spokesman said that the Hynix-Numonyx joint venture and IM Flash won’t compete because IM Flash has only its two parent companies as customers, we’ll see what the future holds: Spinoff companies, like teenagers, are known to rebel against their parents.

Of note, Numonyx has become cozy with more than just one memory company; it also inked an agreement last month with Elpida to collaborate on NOR flash. Making for one crowded bed, Qimonda has also been getting cozy with Elpida. The Infineon-spinoff company this week confirmed that it is continuing its discussions with Elpida on a possible manufacturing partnership.

Stepping out of the manufacturing world, expect Motorola to tighten its relationship with Qualcomm. Sanjay Jha left Qualcomm to become Motorola’s co-CEO and CEO of its mobile devices business this week. Filling two seats, Jha had been Qualcomm’s COO since 2006 and president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT) since 2003. His departure seems almost blessed by Qualcomm, which in its statement praised the exiting exec, a not common practice.

Engineering study also received praise this week by a salary survey company that reported such degrees rank as the top undergraduate degrees by salary. STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) degrees took all top 10 slots in the ranking.

Apple, meanwhile, wasn’t feeling loved this week, at least not by EDN’s Brian Dipert. See his wittily headlined blog entry, “The turn of Apple’s worm: Success accelerates its stumbles” for Brian’s take on Apple, Windows, and how Intel plays in the mix. 

In its own mix, Intel began detailing its first Larrabee-based product. Not expected until next year or 2010, the product will target the PC graphics market and will be the first many-core x86 Intel architecture. Among the details Intel offers on Larrabee, the company says the architecture will include a new approach to the software rendering 3-D pipeline.

Intel rival AMD, meanwhile, this week made an effort to drive adoption of industry standards in general purpose graphics processing software development and announced plans full support of Microsoft DirectX 11 and OpenCL to enable increased C/C++ cross-platform programming efficiency in an update to its Stream software development kit.

Streams of water recently flowed through a Semtech power discrete fab, which endured a fire in late July, one that the company reported this week could cost it more than $3 million.

Hey remember those battery fires that made headlines last year? Well, they didn’t do anything to hamper lithium-ion battery demand or investment. Sony announced a $369 million investment to bump up total monthly production capacity from the current level of 41 million cells per month to 74 million cells in 2010. The move came after Sony’s Japan-based rivals Matsushita and Sanyo announced lithium-ion battery production investments to better meet demand, ones that reach as high as the $1.15 billion mark.

Have something to say on the above noted happenings? Share your comments on this week’s news and analysis below.

–Suzanne Deffree, Managing Editor, News